Google Core Updates Recovery
For businesses that rely heavily on organic traffic, Google core updates can have massive implications on them because Google deals with 92% of the Web’s search queries. Huge drops in site traffic are experienced by some organisations as a result of a core update and this has extremely negative implications for the Profitability or even viability of many businesses but there is good news that there are steps you can take to gradually improve the situation and give from your side the best chance possible of regaining Lost rankings.
Slightly mixed messages about how possible it is to recover from a broad core update have always been given by Google over the years. The company support page dedicated to the topic is explicit that is pages that drop after a core update do not have anything wrong to fix on another hand John Mueller, who is a Webmaster trends analyst at Google and is the key public face of the company when it comes to rising site owners on SEO. He has indicated a few times that it is Impact possible to make changes to your site that can bring lost traffic back after a core update and before the next one is rolled out too.
Mueller in his Google search Central video Hangouts has said that in the aftermath of a broad core update there are various incremental improvements that you can make to recover from a drop in rankings. There is no definitive answer to the question that how incremental improvements can potentially get out of a traffic Dip because the vast majority of the inner workings of its algorithm secret is kept by Google. It is an understandable reaction when you with a sizeable dip or even an outright collapse in your site traffic freaking out. However, if it leads to you rushing through a bunch of changes to your site and its content without fully thinking them through then it can also be counterproductive.
A very important thing that needs to be kept in mind about core updates is that they usually take a couple of weeks to roll out and can lead to a lot of wide but temporary changes in rankings which is something that SEO experts sometimes refer to as the Google dance. Among these early changes in rankings, a lot may not be permanent but if you are lucky you may find that your traffic has reverted to its original level within a couple of weeks. So it is a big gamble if you make radical and big changes to your site in the middle of a broad core update and can be the one that could negatively affect aspects of your content that Google approves of.
So you need to stay calm and wait until you know that a code update rollout is complete and that you have been adversely affected before taking action on your site. When a broad code update is finished rolling out you can usually find out that Google Search Liaison Twitter feed updates. The Search Engine Roundtable website is also a nice place to check for news on how a core update is progressing. The second thing you need to do is use data to identify content that has been particularly affected by the rollout of a broad core algorithm and that needs improvement. If you use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush then you may already have a position tracking set up that can help you spot rankings that have taken a hit along with the associated content.
Google Analytics and Google search console can also be invaluable in helping you to identify pages that have suffered significant traffic drops. Using the data from these to compile a spreadsheet of problem pages that have seen a particularly sharp drop in traffic. Then you need to look at the list of your problem pages from a relevant point of view. You can make your content more relevant than everybody else by ensuring that your pages and posts are up to date.
Google uses content freshness as a way to determine relevancy. The main purpose of Google is to ensure that overall we are delivering on our mission to prevent relevant and authoritative content to searchers and as long as in 2010 it publicly announced that it has created an algorithm specifically to do that Caffeine. Google encourages you to ask yourself a list of questions while trying to improve the content that has been affected by a core update so you need to sense check your poorly performing pages against Google relevance questions.
Contents that perform well in Google search results cover topics in a very depth way so you need to ensure that you are covering topics in depth. So you need to take a look at the pages and posts that are now outranking yours and ask yourself questions. Next, you need to improve your pages from an authoritative point of view which is there are generally two things to look at firstly page authority and off-page authority. A search quality evaluator guidelines document of Google of 2015 outlines what the company considered to be an authority space of content on the topic and this document contains a series of expertise trustworthiness and authoritativeness benchmarks that can be used to determine whether a page should be considered an authoritative source of information on a particular subject or not. It is worth reading the document in full to get a complete picture of these benchmarks.
The relevance of your website can be improved by focusing on technical fixes and neglecting the on-page content but by improving the content you can get better results than technical fixes. In Google estimation ranking drop following a core, update indicates that your side is Losing relevance for the queries it is targeting. During the Search Central SEO office hours hangout recording Googles John Mueller stated on 8th October 2021 that a site owner named Granit Doshlaku joins the session to ask about recovering from a core update. He says he has addressed all technical and User experiences focusing on content instead Google’s on recovering from core updates and expected some settings first he tried to keep expectations for recovery realistic.
Previous rankings after improving relevance cannot be automatically regained of a site impacted by a core update. Mueller explains that improving relevance is a Holistic effort and not something that is accomplished by focusing on individual issues thus making some major adjustments to the content is the best way to get Google to see your website as more relevant.